The Intricate Precision of the Field ; The Kabbalistic Mysticism of Robert
Mark Daniel Cohen
William Blake may
have been right. The first and most mystical of the English Romantic Poets may
well have been correct in preferring the exactitude of the line to the vagueness
of the color field. For Blake’s concern was not over the proprieties of
artistic attack but with the capabilities of mind they marshal, and he was perhaps
more accurate and more prescient than an idle reading of his remarks would suggest
when he insisted that in art, and in life, it is the idea rather than the effusion
of emotion that marks insight, precision of mind, and incisive power of imagination.
“The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the
more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work
of art. . . The want of this determinate and bounding form evidences the want
of idea in the artist’s mind. . . Leave out this line and you leave out
life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out
upon it before man or beast can exist.”
“Such art of losing the outlines is the art of Venice and Flanders; it loses
all character, and leaves what some people call, expression: but this is a false
notion of expression; expression cannot exist without character as its stamina;
and neither character nor expression can exist without firm and determinate outline.”
And it is our art, as well, for the line, along with the idea, is become something
of a lost art. It is evident in the art schools as well as in the galleries that
the rigors of draughtsmanship have wavered and succumbed to the tepid and meandering
impulses of a taste for undirected and unreflective expression. As for intellectual
determination and clarity of thought, in Conceptual Art it is the word “conceptual”
that marks where the hole is. Pop Art has received seemingly every conceivable
ingenuity to excuse it from being what it blatantly is. Abstract painting, which
was conceived as a high-temperature intellectual enterprise — aimed at triggering
a meditative state and, with it, insights into that which could not be visually
rendered — has deteriorated into a visual language game for shifting around
pawns of technical or cut-and-dried conceptual finesse, and where once penetrating
personal vision found its home, it is now absent. We live in a time, and among
an art, in which idiosyncrasy has substituted for individuality, notions for
the complexity of authentic concepts, mere sincerity for the hard labor of honesty,
and the iron stamina of character is precisely what is at issue. Blake may well
have witnessed the future.
Of course, Blake was an extremist. He worried only the side of the equation that
challenged him. Everything in his poetry and his engravings indicates that he
had no trouble with the capacity for feelings, and it seems clear that his polemics
on line and precision of thought constitute an attempt at a balancing, a try
at establishing a conceptual, literary framework comparable to and capable of
encompassing his emotionally rooted mystical visions. For it is a tightrope walk:
the progress of the spirit in comprehending both its environment and its own
nature — a progress that ultimately amounts to a project of acquiring a
personal specificity, of acquiring an individual nature, of accomplishing character
— is a continuous, and a continuously dangerous, rebalancing and recalibrating
of emotion and thought. It is the reason that as we dream, we must come to act,
and as we act, we must come to dream, for neither will do the work of the other.
Both feeling and thought must ultimately be thrown to their highest pitch, and
at every moment, each must be integrated with the other. As the psychologist
C. G. Jung warned, when we feel where we should think, or think where we should
feel, there will come nothing but trouble. And the danger is always of falling
— falling into chaos and confusion, into meaninglessness, into the terrors
of a profound lassitude, into the loss of all direction and energy, into mediocrity.
In our own time, there has been a falling off, and that falling off is a measure,
for the current condition of thought is not how our era in art began. It opened
with a sense of purpose and an optimism of achieving a goal that can be found
in the writings of all the principal progenitors of abstract art — in the
thoughts of Gauguin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, and Gabo among
so many others. Almost to a person, their project was one of mystical insight
— a mission to use art to break down the final barrier between us and an
otherwise inexpressible truth, a Kantian conception of the purpose of art as
one of discovering and conveying what no other capability of mind can accomplish,
a late Romantic mission of the Sublime, rooted in the ideas of nineteenth-century
German Romantic philosophy, in the ideas of Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, Goethe,
Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. As the literary critic Hugh Kenner once wrote of
the Symbolist period and the time of Stéphane Mallarmé, the first
and originating stage of Modern Art: “Ah, those where brave days.”
These days in art are anything but brave. That is why it is a signal moment,
and a moment of refreshing importance, to come upon work of a young artist who
has a sense of the importance of the mission we have all inherited, who has a
sense of the responsibilities that have devolved upon art in our time. Such is
the work of Robert Sagerman, who is having his first solo exhibition at Margaret
Thatcher Projects.
I have met Sagerman in the past, have seen some of his work in his studio, and
frankly, it is about time. Sagerman’s paintings are in the tradition of
color field painting, and like the primary examples of the mode, they are explorations
of mystical import, driven in Sagerman’s case by ideas drawn from the artist’s
study of the Kabbalah, the mystical discipline of Jewish religious scholars.
(Sagerman is also a doctoral candidate in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York
University.) As such, they fall into the high tradition of Modernist Art generally
— the mission of unfolding the Sublime, of rendering pure revelation. For
Sagerman, the specific aim is to obtain and confer a direct apprehension of the
emergence of material substance out of the immaterial foundation of reality —
to see the world emanating from the mind of God, to witness manifestation out
of nothingness, or out of what is to us nothingness: the ultimate immaterial
being.
The 11 paintings in his exhibition, all of them done this year in oil on canvas,
are ideally representative examples of Sagerman’s aesthetic line of attack.
Each is constructed of small daubs of oil paint, applied with the palette knife
over a period of months, that build up to matte the surface in a coating of dense
pigments so heavy, they seem almost a woven overlay of coagulated fabric. The
individual daubs of paint, organized in each work in a coordinated palette of
limited hues, have been sculpted in their application, laid on to the point of
almost dripping down the surface. Each one comes to a point, the canvas as a
whole is a mass of spiking strokes, a bristling intricacy of brilliant tendrils.
The effect overall is comparable to pointillism — an aesthetic vision built
of minute details, all of them perfectly visible, and as visible as the totality
they combine to create — only this is the pointillism of the color field:
intimate constructive details of the field of tone, as if Rothko had been fused
with Seurat.
The idea behind the method is one of searching after meaning in an ultimately
meaningless activity. As he makes clear in his artist’s statement, available
in the gallery, and as he has explained to me, during the laborious and repetitively
systematic activity in creating each work, Sagerman senses and follows a meaning
that escapes his ability to explain to himself. As he paints, he keeps a notebook
for each project, in which he records data pertaining to the work, such as daily
records of numbers of strokes (hence, the title of the exhibition) and time spent
with each color. These tabulations of factual details involved in the making
of each work has a strong connection with the Kabbalah, which itself involves
strategies of numerology, discovered in studies of the Old Testament in Hebrew,
for unearthing hidden, mystical meanings of the hermetic text. The connection
is strengthened by the titles of many of the works, which employ terminology
from kabbalistic studies: Zarqa (26,271), 2003 refers to the idea of the casting
out of the divine presence from higher realms, an emission that renders a physical
world with the divine incipient within it; Mei’ayin #2 (5762), 2003, which
means “from nothing,” denotes the process of manifestation that results
in the creation of the material world.
The strategies of tabulation, of course, render no meaning, for they are the
mere details of physical effort, and the urge, on the part of Sagerman during
his work, to grasp a comprehensible meaning collapses, which is the very point.
As he explains in his artist’s statement, “When […] explications
come inevitably to fail, when the meaning-generating rational faculty is thwarted,
when experience exceeds the system’s own bounds and only the dimension of
the stark encounter with the refulgent remains, the system, paradoxically, has
done its work.”
All this complexity of process is nicely conceptual, but it is ultimately immaterial.
For Sagerman’s procedures of pursuing and failing to locate meaning to his
activities as he executes them are compositional strategies — they constitute
a meditative practice for the artist, a procedural means for getting the painting
done. What they are not is a communicative tactic, and their explanation is of
no value to the viewer, and of no interest beyond that of idle curiosity. It
may be interesting to know how an artist does the work of art, but it does not,
and it never does, help us to see. What is needed in any art, and what is invariably
present in all successful works, is a lingua franca — a visual language
that bridges the world of the artist and the world of the viewer, an organizational
principle of meaning that makes the work available to the viewer, such that the
viewer need not be walked through the meaning of the work by way of artists’
statements or art-critical texts. In the end, the viewer is alone with the art
— that is the base line situation — and it must be a relationship capable
of a meaningful experience.
Because Sagerman is a painter, he has a lingua franca, for he is participating
in what has been the core means of painterly articulation for centuries —
the individual stroke. Ever since the late work of Titian, and more particularly,
since Velasquez, the principal unit of meaning in painting has been the brush
stroke — its form, its implied movement, its commission of a single hue,
its embroidering of the surface, and its compounded density of texture have all
been the communicative language of painting, which is nothing more than to say
that style is the conveyance of meaning, style and not content. To those accomplished
in viewing, it is never what the painter displays that matters, it is rather
the way in which it has been displayed. Without the articulation of style, all
one has is the image, and the image is nothing, for the subject of painting is
not the concrete vision — the subject of painting is paint, in the way it
is chosen, kneaded, and deployed under the influence of the artist’s need
to communicate what is nearly impossible to convey. This has been the case ever
since the individual brush stroke became visually evident in late Titian, and
it is the very development that makes meaningful abstract, nonrepresentational
painting possible. Since then, to understand any painting, one has had to become
articulate in the language of the stroke. Those who did not were left, and are
left, with nothing more than mere pictures.
With Sagerman, the unit is the touch of the palette knife, but the conveyance
is the same. Each of his surfaces seems to seep out of some backdrop that is
invisible to the eye of the viewer, having been, evidently, covered over by the
spill of material substance. In the heavy weave they commit, the touches of pigment
give the tangible, tactile sense of pouring slowly through the canvas, beginning
to ooze into the world, to ooze up as the world of materiality, emerging through
the scrim of some borderland terrain that lies between here and somewhere utterly
else. It is as if the very hyle — the basic and original substance of the
world — were coming into being, yet to take on form, yet to obey the principium
individuationus, yet to make a world of multiplicity, a world of things, of beings
such as us. One needs no text or statement to perceive this — it is evident
through the paintings alone. And there is precedent for this in Modern Art. Sagerman
cites the influence of Milton Resnik, Alfred Jensen, and Roman Opalka. But the
more pertinent references, beyond Seurat, might be Richard Pousette-Dart and
Jay Defeo, specifically with The Rose, in their sheer massiveness and their pursuit,
through massiveness of application, of the immaterial.
Despite its degree of effectiveness in suggesting experiences that only mystics
and aesthetes generally hope to have, Sagerman’s art is a young art. There
are aspects that are weak in comparison to that which is strong in his work.
His color strategies are largely pro forma — they are theoretically correct,
properly balanced, and he always works his way around the palette. But they lack
the careful imbalance and tipping over of dramatic mood, the dominance of a tone
of feeling. There are certain basics, rudimentary qualities of rendition that
no art can hope to avoid, or avoids at its peril, and among them are the tones
of personal drama. Every successful abstract painting, regardless of the subtlety
of its ultimate ambitions, is rooted in an elementary emotion. Such works are
always, in the most general sense of their presentation, happy, or sad, or desperate,
or content. Kandinsky always has a mood, as does Pollock, as does Rothko. Even
the most fleeting and far-reaching apprehensions begin in such crude emotional
conditions, for the subtlety of insight cannot, it appears, be built from theory.
It is a personal thing, as personal as joy, as personal as sorrow.
Despite the lack of basic drama, despite the partial absence of the person of
the artist, Sagerman’s paintings are not theory-bound, not even by the theory
of the Kabbalah. His works provide an authentic aesthetic experience, one that
goes beyond the material of their making and beyond the ideas that have driven
them, and as with all authentic aesthetic experience, it is an encounter with
the Sublime, and with the mystical. In that, his works are also a knowing and
appropriate descendent of the heritage Sagerman has adopted, the inheritance
of color field painting, which, whenever it works well — as it does in Sagerman
— combines the precise idea with the piquancy of emotional feel, and demonstrates
that Blake had only one side of the warning: just as necessary as the exactitude
of the ideational line is the lavish effusion of the tone. Robert Sagerman: 435,546
Marks
Margaret Thatcher Projects
Chelsea, New York Sources:
Web Sites: Margaret Thatcher Projects: http://www.thatcherprojects.com/
Contents, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake: http://www.english.uga.edu/nhilton/Blake/blaketxt1/
The William Blake
Archive
http://www.blakearchive.org/ Books:
William Blake, Blake’s Exhibition and Catalogue of 1809, in The Complete
Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman. (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1982)
